Bug 472406 – net-im/bitlbee - systemd unit starts bitlbee as root

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description John Roman 2013-06-05 13:44:57 UTC]

the systemd service will never work as it is, the binary target is incorrect and the execution is as root.

[Comment 1 John Roman 2013-06-05 13:45:26 UTC]

Created attachment 350206 [details]
functional bitlbee service

[Comment 2 Tim Harder 2014-01-24 02:14:37 UTC]

Reassigning to systemd since I don't have systems to test with.

[Comment 3 Mike Gilbert 2014-01-24 03:10:10 UTC]

This patch probably makes more sense; no reason to run as nobody when we are creating a dedicated user/group.

John: Can you confirm this works for you? I'm not going to install/test this just for a simple user change.

--- a/init/bitlbee.service.in
+++ b/init/bitlbee.service.in
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
 
 [Service]
 ExecStart=@sbindir@/bitlbee -F -n
+User=bitlbee
 
 [Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Comment 4 Pacho Ramos 2014-02-01 19:08:06 UTC]

Also, since the unit file is provided by upstream, maybe a report to them could help to improve the unit file (and prevent us from needing to patch it forever)

[Comment 5 Tim Harder 2014-02-01 19:11:14 UTC]

(In reply to Pacho Ramos from comment #4)
> Also, since the unit file is provided by upstream, maybe a report to them
> could help to improve the unit file (and prevent us from needing to patch it
> forever)

Unfortunately upstream isn't very responsive at times, I still have patches sitting in trac tickets from a while ago. It's probably still good to try though.

[Comment 6 Pacho Ramos 2014-02-01 19:29:30 UTC]

Then, feel free to go ahead and commit Mike's patch :)

[Comment 7 Ihar Hrachyshka 2014-02-09 21:22:15 UTC]

Running bitlbee as 'bitlbee' user shows another problem in 'journalctl' though:

booxter@localhost /usr/lib/systemd/system $ sudo systemctl status bitlbee
bitlbee.service - BitlBee IRC/IM gateway
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib64/systemd/system/bitlbee.service; enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2014-02-09 15:25:48 CET; 3s ago
 Main PID: 20819 (bitlbee)
   CGroup: /system.slice/bitlbee.service
           └─20819 /usr/sbin//bitlbee -F -n

Feb 09 15:25:48 localhost systemd[1]: Started BitlBee IRC/IM gateway.
Feb 09 15:25:48 localhost bitlbee[20819]: Warning: Warning: Couldn't write PID to `/var/run/bitlbee.pid'
Feb 09 15:25:48 localhost bitlbee[20819]: Warning: Couldn't write PID to `/var/run/bitlbee.pid'

[Comment 8 Pacho Ramos 2014-02-09 22:19:25 UTC]

I think it's just a warning taking care it is running in non-forking mode, maybe upstream will know more about why that warning is shown when running with foreground options

[Comment 9 Mike Nerone 2014-06-05 11:19:30 UTC]

Help for users:

You can make both the run-as-wrong-user and can't-write-pid problems go away for now by creating /etc/systemd/system/bitlbee.service.d/fix-exec.conf containing these lines:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/bitlbee -F -n -P /dev/null
User=bitlbee

Various aspects of this could be used in Gentoo's ebuild fix, as well.

By way of explanation of the one strange line, "ExecStart=", it just clears the ExecStart set by the main unit file. This is necessary because more than one is allowed, so they would stack by default instead of overriding. Explicitly clearing it first prevents that.

[Comment 10 Tim Harder 2016-09-05 03:22:52 UTC]

Should be fixed in 3.4.2-r1.